lin

I adapted two screenplays to novels and plan on doing more. I've gotten some crap from agents about one of them being "too skeletal", "too much like a script". (Wonder if I hadn't told them?)

My questions is: what the hell is wrong with that? In the sixties there was a lot of using camera angles and cinema stuff in fiction. But now it's BAD to write starkly of with a cinematic eye?

I told one agent (I try not to talk to these people often) "I'm not interested in people who read "The Godfather" (very poorly written book) I'm going for people who watched "The Sopranos" (very well-written).

So, what thoughts on this? Do we have to avoid being like TV and films?

How about it Writ?

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starseed

Im not sure. I do know that when I think about what to write, I see it in my head like a movie. I dont really think about the words Im going to use until Im writing them. I think how to get across the picture, and how to write it so the reader will see it in their head, like a movie. Does this make sense or am I not getting what you are saying.

Ceresz

I don't think we should avoid being like TV and films. If that is your style why would you change it? When I write I clearly invision the scene in my head and simply describe it, just as if I'm watching a movie.

I bet that there even are readers who are looking for a book that reads like a movie? Dan Brown, anyone? The only difference is that in the books you get to learn about the thoughts of the characters, etc.

So, basically, my answer is no. You should not avoid being like TV and films.

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"...Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish..."
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quarterscot

I've always thought novels and TV/films to be completely different art forms. Not quite as dissilimiar as, say, literature and painting, but close. Creating a powerful visual image through words and through a camera are two very different skills. The former is always going to be more subjective; the image filtered first by the writer and then by the reader. And as Ceresz says, a novel will always be able to carry a character's thoughts more directly. I think the differences are one reason why so, so many great books have been made into awful movies.

That said, an obvious meeting point is in dialogue. Watching TV and films has helped the dialogue in my novels a lot. It's sharpened the structure and rhythm, helped me get my words into the sort of sentances people might actually say. (Which some novels tend to overlook.) And films, simply because of the constraints of their length, have always been less like novels than TV shows. Certainly The Sopranos, with its multi-stranded plots and patient character developments, is closer to a novel than anything I've seen on the screen.

I've probably missed your point entirely, Lin. All I'm trying to say is, all art forms have their strengths and constraints. The trouble with using one thing to be like another is that you can overlook the strengths and get bogged down in the constraints.

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Andrew
http://whyisthishere.co.uk

starseed

I'm having a hard time understanding what something that reads like a movie would be like. Can someone post an example of what we are talking about here? Everything I read I see in my head like a movie. I'm not sure I understand.

CaptainFreedom

If you're describing the viewing angle of the observer or something like that, that's probably not a good idea. I mean everybody has their own style and you can write whatever you want, but if I was reading a book like that it would be distracting.

But if that's not what you were doing, it sounds like you didn't add enough of your own ideas into the story to flesh it out a little bit. If you're watching a movie, the actors' expressions and mannerisms can give you information about the character. In a book you might have to put in a new scene to flesh out the characters (if you're allowed to) or have some more internal dialog by being careful about whose viewpoint you're writing in.

CF

Non Serviam

If you're writing a screenplay, I'd say they're a bloody essential influence!

Seriously--21st century novel writing is cinematic. I mean, there's a perceived need for a consistent viewpoint, or viewpoint character--so the reader knows where the camera is and where it's pointing. Material's written in scenes with scene-breaks for camera shifts. In fact, we're writing for the TV generation.

Pre-television writing makes instructive reading. Pick a Dickens off your bookshelf and read the first couple of chapters, looking carefully to identify viewpoint characters and scene demarcations--it's difficult, isn't it? Same with Austen. They weren't writing for the TV generation so their writing wasn't cinematic. Instead they took pleasure in the beauty of language and a well-turned phrase, which means that nowadays, only an elite of very fluent readers find they can really enjoy them.

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Born naked, helpless, unable to care for himself and completely open-minded, Non Serviam has subsequently surmounted all these difficulties and gone on to become a decently-clothed, self-sufficient, close-minded sod.

Rly

It depends. I've found that writers who write with an "eye" toward more cinematic writing often get carried away in description and action and forget that the most important part of any story is the characters. (Characters create--or at least should create--the events of the plot. In cinematic writing, characters are often acted upon. I know there are exceptions, many of them even, but I'm speaking more in generalities here.)

Then again, others teeter to the opposite and what results is the problem you described. I think in your case, TV and other media are absolutely important influences to you. When agents say "starkly", I think they mean the piece is lacking life and character, maybe even description.

When writers let it take them over, any form of media can be a bad influence. I just had to abandon 57,000 words of a novel (IE--all of it) because I let myself get too influenced by a video game: Crisis Core (A Final Fantasy installment and a very good one, if you like the series and own a PSP). When I first saw Dragonheart, every one of my stories was saturated with talking dragons that aided noble knights. Let's not get into music, magazines, and TV.

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~Rest if you must/but never quit.~

lin

Very good points, Non.

starseed, here are some of the first graphs of a novel I adapted from a screenplay and has been described as "too cinematic" or "reads like a script" by agents.


She'd only been screaming for a minute, but it sounded like a lifetime. Her angular, Indian face was flushed and torn with the force of her screams. Standing on the crumbling walkway in front of her room, leaning on the rusting railing, clutching down in incoherent supplication, Señora Violeta Camponeta poured out a stream of ejaculations and petitions to God, the Virgin, and anyone who was taking calls.

Her ragtag mob of children ran to her side just as she passed out, slumped over the rail with gaunt hands gripping at the air. Her ragamuffins, whether looking at their stricken mother or at what she saw below, took up her screams, wailing in a harmonic chorus. Señora Camponeta fell heavily to the cement, her children keening around her like birds.

Barrio Lobo's only police car idled in an unpaved alley littered with car parts, broken piñatas, and ruptured garbage bags. Cameron Cole sat at the wheel, clearing the call by radio. A beach athlete pushing forty, Cam’s rangy blonde surfer look gave no clue to his shrewd professionalism. He was still a Sergeant simply because he had always been too laid-back to care. And he'd grown to like being The Law in such this ugly, forgotten borderline backwater. If it had only been a little closer to the beach.

Officer Novena Rosas glared out her window, registering her scorn at the filth and disarray that sprawled along the unpaved higgly-piggly of graffitied garages and rusted-out fence. She herself was spiffed, starched, and tailored: an attractive Chicana striving to be Super-Cop. In perfect health, muscle tone and condition right up the whites of her eyes, wrapped in starched pleats and flak jacket that couldn’t completely conceal her muscular, provocative figure. But her palpable hard-assed attitude insisted on all that being irrelevant from the start.

Cole replaced the microphone, took another scan of the garbage fence. "Not only don't I see any wild dog pack, I don't even see any rats."

Rosas snorted her disgust. "Amazing. They must have gotten deported."

"Okay, just report this trash situation to the county."

"That'll take care of that problem. In a year or two."

"I'll tell the caller we looked into it and..."

But Rosas snapped up a silencing hand, cocked her head to the window. No doubt about it: women and children screaming. She was out of the car in one explosive motion, sprinting down the alley to peer through the chain link fence behind the Frontera Motor Court, a graceless stucco “Spanish” motel from the fifties now disintegrated into a squalid, crumbling squat pad.

Cole had the car in gear, the mic in hand. "What the hell is it, Rosas?"

Rosas half turned, "Around front! The Frontera!" Then she was up on the fence, flowing over the top with athletic grace and power before the patrol unit even spun gravel. Inside the fence she bounding sure-footedly down a tangle of discarded refrigerators and mattress boxes, over a rubble of broken deck chairs and onto the cracked apron of the sickly green pool.


Everything was quiet, peaceful, effortless. Welcoming. Greenish yellow light flickered in and out of fishscale patterns: nothing to hear, nothing to see but two small hands desperately clutching a rusty old engine head as it softly came to rest on the slimy bottom. The dancing green/gold patterns dazzled and merged, the light became warm and golden, emanating from beyond the cement of the pool. The light soothed, beckoned. It showed what everybody always suspected the light would reveal: a golden, sun-kissed world of happy people, generations of family members sitting at hearty meals, smiling people waving warm welcomes.

He had lived seven years of pain and disappointment, but now a sweet rich world opened before him like a blossom, hung right at his fingertips. Bubbles of air escaped as Pepito Camponeta smiled. His eyes closed. His breathing stopped. His heart beat slower and slower. Twice a minute. Slower. Deeper, more golden, more bright. So bright it burned out of his chest, glorious and brave.

Then the ripples jumped into jagged jitters as Novena Rosas slammed into the water, reaching the bottom with one powerful stroke. She tried to pry the wiry little fingers from the rusty holes of the engine head. She gave up on that, planted her feet and lifted it to her chest. Pushing off from the slimy bottom, she reached the surface in a lunge, carrying the boy and the block of iron back to the air and the light and the hard, howling world of sound.

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tucanbundy

I base almost everything on TV and movies.

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CaptainFreedom

I think it's a viewpoint problem. You give a quick overview of Rosas and Cole in the same chapter (and right after each other) so it seems as if the reader is just being informed instead of finding out naturally. Then the reader has to figure out for himself that the viewpoint has changed to the kid at the bottom of the pool. It's pretty confusing.

If I were you, I would leave the whole section in Rosas's viewpoint and you could describe Cole by having her think about him. I know some people think that you don't have to stick with one perspective at a time, but I say that's crazy talk.

When I first started writing I had to fix about a hundred pages like that, and it was a real pain in the ass sometimes. Just read through your chapters and figure out whose point of view will require the least amount of rewriting. Otherwise you'll pretty much have to replan and redo the whole thing.

CF

lin

Not really a problem.

This thing is sold.

I didn't put it her for critique, but in response to a quesiton.

By the way, this whole POV obsessioin, "head-hopping" thing is the fad of the year, but it's essentially meaningless.

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The Backward OX

starseed, the problem here is my old hobby-horse. In communication between people, the written word used on its own is almost a complete failure at conveying meaning. You have two or three other posters here "talking" about something completely different because they didn't understand what you meant. On the other hand, by chance, I did.

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How Beautiful it is to Do Nothing, and then Rest Afterwards . . . . . Spanish proverb

lin

Aw, come on, Ox. Don't mindfuck starseed. He is asking genuine questions instead of spouting off blather. That should be encouraged here.

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The Backward OX

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How Beautiful it is to Do Nothing, and then Rest Afterwards . . . . . Spanish proverb